Loss is Only the Beginning
by TravelingRoses
Summary: Gabe Jones had a functioning idea of what he needed to do when he got off the boat that took him from smoke and blood and gunfire to the victorious streets of America. First, he had a package of burdens to deliver to a sister that's been left to pick up the pieces of his friends' martyred lives. Afterwards, the daunting task of trying to find his way home again.


**Notes:**

1) Any and all grammar and spelling mistakes are mine and if you find some please point them out to me so that I can fix them.

2) The attitudes reflected here are period typical (racism and the like) and in no ways reflect the actual views of the author.

3) If any non-English words used in the fic are being used incorrectly please tell me so that I can fix them.

_"I will not say, do not weep, for not all tears are an evil."_

_~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King_

The area of Brooklyn that Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes had grown up in was dirty. It smelled of mold and piss and all sorts of human waste that happened when large groups of people were forced to coexist in limited space; all at once it struck Gabe as entirely too limited to have housed the two most stubborn sons-of-bitches he had ever had the pleasure of serving with. The tenements were stacked one on top of the other within streets and alleys and their balconies could only generously have been said to hold space for two half-grown adolescents. There were stains on the bricks and homeless milling around outside under box lid coverings and ratty blankets.

But the _people_.

Swarms of women in long, dark skirts and wigs were walking down the street towards a quarter of the neighborhood (or maybe it was a separate neighborhood, he pondered) filled with Jewish shops and delis that Gabe had never encountered in his native Georgian hometown. Bunches of children, skinny and long-limbed, with dirt smudged faces and skins ranging from alabaster to darker than his own. Something no town in the South would have ever condoned and here people were living and working right on top of one another. Just walking down the street, Gabe had heard about seven different languages ranging from harsh Slavic tones to the musicality of the Italian language (so familiar and at once strange to him after trekking through the Italian peninsula for months). He passed a tall, gothic style cathedral and watched as women wearing veils left through the large, wooden doorway, some walking fast and herding children, while others stopped to talk to various women coming out of other churches (Orthodox, Anglican, Protestant). Catholics and Protestants exchanging quick, brief pleasantries mixed in with others who glared and muttered under their breath at those daring to mix. It was like another world. One caught in between the crossroads of the strange and the familiar; those who walked over the boundaries and those who enforced them.

Hell, Gabe was ninety-percent sure that the woman who'd given him directions last night hadn't been a woman at all underneath all that rouge and black eye-paint. The sheer breadth of possibility in this place seemed to overtake its physical space and subsequently rage at the confinement it had been forced in. The stairs of the building he'd been pointed to by the harried looking Italian-speaking – ahem – lady last night when he'd asked, "_La casa di Barnes? Sai dove abitano il signor e la signora Barnes?_" were cracked and mite eaten. Some steps were missing. The smell of boiled cabbage and onions and chicken broth assaulted his senses as he walked up to the third floor, ducking his head underneath the laundry that was hanging from the ceiling on lines. Some buckets were placed in corners near the door catching leaks from when it had rained the night before. It had taken them a few minutes to decipher the rushed mashing of Italian and English words before recognition had set hold in the overly polite night worker's eyes and he was told that he would find who he was looking for about four buildings down from _St. Michael's _and above _O'Reilly's Tavern_, a little bar filled with soldiers and women celebrating their homecoming. He could hear the loud cheering and singing of soldiers come home through the thin wood that made up the floors.

There was a woman at the top of the steps carefully unpinning dresses and child sized clothing from one of the lines near the door that had a faded number 18 above it. Several extremely small flats seemed to be on this floor if the close proximity of the doors was any indication. Standing there and looking around aimlessly it struck Gabe that _la donna_ from the night before had never told him what numbered flat to look for. He straightened his shoulders as the woman shot a look towards him and prepared himself for what might end up being an ugly confrontation. So far, everyone had been decent enough (as much as decency and friendliness could be claimed even in this amalgamation of a neighborhood) but childhood blindness didn't account for adult prejudice. And Gabe had encountered plenty of that in his life growing up in Georgia as well as in the segregated army units he'd fought with before he'd been captured by HYDRA. Even after, when he and the Commandos fought together as one of the most specialized ops team in the allied forces he'd seen the thinly veiled distaste in journalists' and photographers' eyes when they took in him and Morita. This woman's flint eyed gaze was coolly assessing him, taking in every single one of his medals and his soldier's uniform with a sullen twist to her lips.

"You looking for someone?" she asked in the heavy Brooklyn drawl instantly reminiscent of his fallen comrades. The humidity from the summer heat had gotten to her hair, ruining the curls that she might have painstakingly put together (most women were dressing to the nines as much as they could because of the return of their men) and was pushed back by a red scarf keeping stray strands from her face. Beads of sweat were trailing from her hairline and over her neck, disappearing underneath her open collared beige blouse. He clutched at the package under his arms tighter, the rough material of the wrapping paper scraping at the pads of his fingers. Her eyes flickered to it before coming back to rest suspiciously on his face.

"Yes ma'am, I am. I was told I might find a Mrs. Proctor around here?" His mama hadn't raised him to be impolite to a lady. The woman raised an eyebrow and Gabe couldn't tell if that was because his quarry was near or if the lady had no idea whom he was referring to. He prayed it was the former rather than the latter. The package felt like a weight in his hands that was dragging him down to the bottom of the ocean to rest right next to downed planes and fallen martyrs. An entire legacy was contained within this box and he wanted both to clutch it close and keep it near but push it away and let it go.

"There's no Mrs. Proctor here. Not anymore," she replied after a long pause. Her voice was harsh and smoke roughed. There were yellowed tobacco stains on the pads of her fingers. Gabe fought to keep dismay off his face and schooled his features into a polite, inquiring smile.

"Can you please tell me where she went?"

She shrugged and started to pull the rest of her laundry off of the line but her eyes never left him. The steel in her gaze was bringing him back to when he and the rest of the POW's were under the microscopic watch of the guards in the HYDRA prison in Azzano. His fingers twitched uncomfortably around the package, briefly startled when they encountered paper rather than the heavy, cool metal of his rifle.

"Depends on what you'd be wanting her for." She reached down to heft up the basket from the floor, and her outfit stretched taunt - a dress that was too thin and too small tightening around the shape of her body. Gabe firmly fixed his eyes to the wall across from him. It had been so long since he'd been this close to a woman that wasn't an officer or an agent (wasn't a nurse patching up wounds and offering her condolences). Weeks coming back from Europe to America and the first thing he'd done is set out for Brooklyn. Hadn't even stopped to visit a house of ill repute for some good old-fashioned comfort like he'd known Dugan and Morita were off to do. The lack of it was doing strange things to his head, making him act like one of those lecherous blockheads that Agent Carter had given a well-deserved dressing down too.

"To deliver a package ma'am. From her brother, Sergeant James Barnes."

The woman turned away from him with a brittle laugh and remarked bitterly, "Best come inside then soldier. You hungry? Got stew cooking. Its cabbage, mind you, and not much else but it's food."

She opened the door, number 18, but Gabe stayed rooted to his place on the second to last step up the stairs, "Ma'am?" He'd never been invited into a lone white woman's home for a sit-in and supper before. He looked around to see if anyone was about to come out of their flats with torches and pitchforks.

"None of that ma'am baloney either, Mr. Jones. It's Rebecca," she called from inside her flat, "Now hurry it up. I haven't got all day. Kids will be back later."

* * *

Rebecca Barnes, not Mrs. Proctor as she'd so helpfully pointed out ("seems weird to be using Richard's name still when he's nothing but a corpse in France somewhere"), was so painfully similar looking to her older brother that it was a wonder how Gabe had missed it. They had the same dark brown hair but Bucky's had been neat and army cut regulation that was a stark contrast to her long, chaotic mess. Their eyes were a different color – she'd inherited some sort of flinty gray tone that made her appear standoffish rather than charming – but they both held the same quick, sharp intelligence. Rebecca had a round, plump-cheeked face like her brother but whereas the pouty lips had given her brother a handsome, rakish air it did little to make the small and slender Rebecca beautiful. She was a tad bit mousy, the type of face that Monty or Dugan might have passed over in search of more conventionally attractive women. The dull pallor of her skin alongside the dark, tired circles under her eyes did little to help but Gabe knew he wasn't looking his best at the moment either.

Gabe had a mere scant bit of knowledge about Rebecca, or Becca as Bucky had affectionately referred to her as, about as much as he knew about anyone of his companions' families really. She was the only surviving sibling that Bucky had because their younger twin sisters had both died as babes from polio right after the family had moved from Indiana to Brooklyn to live with their aunt and uncle after the passing of their mother from child-bed fever. Their father hadn't stuck around. He'd been a military man through-and-through and had left his children in the hands of his sister with not a word of goodbye. Becca was about twentyfour or five, had married young, and she was a spitfire according to Rogers. Barnes had told them that his little sister was "the most mule-headed dame on the planet. She and Steve don't have two brain cells to rub together when it comes to self-preservation." In fact, Bucky had met Steve when a pint-sized Rebecca decided to wade into an alley fight when they were around eight or nine to help out the scrawny little blonde boy.

She was the only person that Bucky had listed as next-of-kin after Steve Rogers and that was the reason he was currently sitting in this small two-room apartment with a strange woman. There was a tub in the corner, claw-foot and rusted with pipes drilled into the wall. Next to it was the sink with stacks of used dishes she hadn't had time to tend too. A cast iron skillet hung on a peg over the stove alongside a couple of other well-used kitchen utensils. The pot of cabbage stew was on the stove and there was a small ice-box next to it. All of her crockery (a few chipped plates and mugs) was stacked on top of it. Her place held a small, square table that he was currently sitting at and a worn couch with a relatively new record player and a radio on the writing desk pushed against the wall. There was a stack of books on one of the shelves of the desk and a few pictures. Gabe couldn't take his eyes off the one that had pride of place in the center. There, immortalized in black and white was Bucky and a small (almost beyond belief) Steve Rogers smiling with smudged faces. On the right side of the writing desk was a twin sized cot with two pillows. Another pillow and a threadbare blanket were draped across the couch. On the left there was a piano sitting dusty and unused, music books stacked on top of it. Next to them was a small, round mirror and Gabe imagined that there was where she sat there in the mornings to get ready.

Despite all of her late husband's pay and half of her brother's, Rebecca Barnes was clearly a working woman. She had the harried look of a woman who moved too fast and got too little done with next to no sleep. Her son and daughter were, according to her, watched daily by an old neighborhood Jewish grandmother who ran a cheap service for those single mothers whose husbands had never come back to the war and needed to find ways to support their mouths to feed. There was a factory uniform in Rebecca's size folded on one of the kitchen chairs. The clothes in the basket were too full to be all just hers and two children's and there were several more baskets of clothes stacked near the door clearly marked with labels. _Rochester, O'Malley, Abbruzzi, Roth._

Inside the comfort of her home she, either out of nervousness or to fill the tension in the air, talked without pause. She pointed out things that Bucky had given her as children or a few of Steve's drawings that were laying around the writing desk. At any other time Gabe might have drawn her into the conversation. Prolonged it. Gotten to know the Captain and his Sergeant as boys instead of soldiers battle-hardened and war-scarred. But the weight of why he was here was like an anchor on his shoulders and he could hardly put it off.

So, impatient but raised better, he politely waited while Rebecca placed a bowl of cabbage stew in front of him with a glass of water. Her hands were shaking slightly, her wedding ring rattling against the glass and it occurred to him that maybe she wasn't so calm having a strange man in her home as she seemed. Bucky had said she could fight tooth-and-nail with the best of them and was scrappy but in his experience most white women would rather give a wide berth to the colored man.

"Well eat. You're skin and bones. Honestly don't they feed their heroes over there in Europe," she quipped, pulling out the chair on the left side of where he was sitting and sipping from her own glass of water.

He watched her fingers twitching as he brought his spoonful of stew up to his lips. It was hot and watery, rather tasteless and entirely too much pepper and the cabbage had that over-boiled texture but it was rather one of the best things he'd had in months. Home-cooked, not spam or hardtack or any other rationed army supplement he'd subsisted on for so long. It had been so long since anyone had cooked for him. Years. Not since he'd left Georgia and he'd spent his last night with his girl down there. Lizzie Martin. Now she'd been something. Should have married her before he'd gone off to Howard, maybe then he'd have something to look forward to back home that wasn't an empty house full of blunted, dusty memories of his Mama and Pop.

"Slow down soldier boy. It's not going to run away on you," Becca's voice cut through the haze of his famished motions. He hadn't even realized he'd been shoveling food into his mouth like a pig at a trough in front of the dame. He delicately put his spoon back into his half gone bowl of stew.

"Beg pardon ma..." she glared at him over the rim of her glass, "Miss Rebecca. I didn't realize I was so hungry. Thank you for the food."

She smiled, which lit up the contours of her face and there was a stark resemblance to Bucky when he was truly amused by something, "If only my kids would be so overjoyed to eat boiled cabbage stew."

"It's wonderful," he told her exactly the way he used to whenever Mama had burned something she'd cooked for them even though and all he wanted was to go down to the corner store and buy some candy.

"Charming. Don't lie. It's shit. Best we've got right now though," she shrugged, resigned in that way most people who'd grown up poor were. They'd learned early to go without and be grateful for what they had and could weather most conditions and crap rations better than those who'd had comfortable times all their lives. Gabe would never forget those few he'd met in basic training who'd come from well-off families shocked and appalled by the mess hall food and rations they'd been supplied with or the cots they'd slept on.

He cleared his throat. Best get to what he'd come all the way down to Brooklyn to tell Rebecca before he lost his nerve. He set his face in an attempt to project an aura of formality – of dissonance – trying not to remember the way her brother had fallen or the look in Steve Rogers' eyes when he'd gotten off the train, Zola in hand and beaten bloody. Tried not to remember Agent Carter's sobbing or Colonel Phillip's calmly informing them that Steve Rogers' had fallen in action. Calm and steady. Just the way the cops had been when they told him his pop had been found bloody in the field or the way the nurse at the hospital had informed them that his mother had succumbed to her consumption.

He hadn't even gotten a word out before Rebecca held up her hand to silence him. Her other hand reached into the pocket of her skirt and she pulled out a crumpled and torn piece of paper.

"I know why you've come Mr. Jones. You don't have to say it. Post came in the mail eight days ago. I know..." she swallowed around the words, squaring her chin and jaw, "I know my brother's gone. Damn fool. Offered their condolences. Said he went like a hero. Small comfort."

Gabe closed his eyes. The bitterness and tiredness made her voice sound harsh; roughened skin that you scraped away trying to get rid of the dirt and grief and blood twisting you up inside.

"Miss Rebecca, I'm sorry. Your brother was a good man. One of the best soldiers I've ever been honored to fight besides," he confessed but the words rang hollow.

She shuddered, "I wasn't sure it was you when you came up the stairs. Bucky'd mentioned you – all of you, said you were a lot of damn fools but good men. I expected Steve though. Where is he? Laid up somewhere in hospital or is he getting some damn medals? Useless trinkets. I know all about that serum. Bucky couldn't keep a secret from me to save his hide. Steve best not be getting on airs now that his outsides match his insides."

The disappointment and bitterness that Steve wasn't here to share in her grief over her brother was clear in her words. His stomach dropped. _She didn't know_. Of course she didn't. She wasn't Steve's family. Not his next-of-kin. The news about Captain America's death hadn't been officially released. Howard Stark was convinced he could find that plane and somehow, someway, Steve would be alive. Like miracles could happen twice and strike home. And here this poor woman was thinking her brother's memory had been cast aside by the one person it should have mattered to the most.

"Miss Rebecca, Captain Rogers…" his insides were twisting and making him feel like he was about to be sick. Months later and it's still there. That pit in his stomach. Distantly, someone choked down a sob. If it was him or her he wouldn't have been able to say. Her knuckles are ghost white around the condolence letter she'd pulled out of her pocket and there is a lump in his throat, always a lump, when he swallows.

"Steve is…" _Gone_. One word. Left silent but its absence fills the room. Bouncing against the wall unseen and cracking at the fragile wall holding them up.

"Don't," she wobbles, "Don't say it. You don't need to say it."

Suddenly, a dam broke from the inside and the flood gates were set free. Tears gathered up in the corners of his eyes. They felt like needles poking at his eyeballs and no amount of incessant blinking would force them out. Force them away. His shoulders slumped and his nose started to clog like he was a child again and couldn't breathe. He held one shaking hand up to his face, all sense of composure gone. He wasn't the only one crying. But she said nothing. Just reached across the table and took his hand.

* * *

Gabe didn't know how long it had been. It could have been hours. It could have been days. Time had no meaning but eventually he felt her slip her hand out of his own when the sudden loss of soothing strokes from work-roughened fingers brought his mind back to the present. He felt, rather than saw, her get up from her chair and begin to move around the room. It was like watching a film – there but somehow not. His eyes were bloodshot, heavy-lidded, the kind of feeling you get when you've stayed up so long but you can't sleep because the moment you did that's when the enemy would come and it would be your mistake. Your mistake that cost the lives of your companions.

Rebecca moved with slow, sure movements. The news of Steve's death seemed to have aged her even more then when he'd first seen her. Her eyes were red and puffy, her face wan and stretched like old parchment. She kneeled down to reach underneath the bed and pulled out a moth bitten suitcase. Emblazoned on the silver lock was a name. _Joseph Rogers_. The blur of long dried tears seemed to create a fog through which Gabe unconsciously watched her. She carefully opened the trunk, fiddling around a bunch of what appeared to be sketchbooks and bits of clothing, until she pulled out a statue. It was of a woman and child, the Virgin Mother, he realized, recognizing in the back of his mind the Catholic iconography. The veil the woman was wearing was painted blue and her eyes seemed to stare right into his soul. Rebecca carefully closed the lid of the trunk and slid it back underneath the bed.

Heavily, she got off her knees and went over to the only window in the apartment. It was small and didn't offer much of a view but the dirty alley below where several kids were playing with a ratty old soccer ball. She pulled out a pack of matches from the pocket of her skirt to light the candle that had been sitting in the window. Next to it she set down the statue.

Nothing was said. No words of explanation. Maybe she felt that he knew instinctively the reasoning behind her actions. Maybe she didn't care to tell him why she was doing what she was doing. This was private. The mourning of a woman who'd grown and loved and lost too many loved ones that she'd never got to say goodbye to. No wakes to go too. No bodies to bury. She didn't spare him any notice as, one by one, she turned each of the pictures in her house towards the wall and then, with purpose, the mirror that was on top of the piano.

Gabe wondered if he should take his leave. Numbly, he recalled Rebecca telling him when he'd arrived that she didn't have forever to speak to him and, looking out the window to where the sun was beginning to set, he realized he'd been there for quite some time. But she made no motion to him that indicated he'd worn out his welcome. Nor, he realized, did he want to leave. Watching her move around the apartment, resembling her brother so much, gave him an odd sense of comfort. He had just met this woman yet he felt like he'd known her all his life.

She walked past him and pulled at the chair she'd been sitting on to slide it across the floor with a faint screech. It creaked under her weight when she stood on it, reaching up to retrieve an extremely dusty bottle from the shelf above the pots and pans. The frayed edges of her beige skirt brushed the edge of her stove when she reached up and the chair teetered on the edges of the floorboards. Gabe began to stand up.

"I won't fall. Got better balance then that," she told him without a glance. She leaned back on the soles of her feet to straighten out the chair. Finally her fingers grasped the bottle. Quick as a flash she pulled down the bottle along with the two shot glasses next to it.

"Miss Rebecca," he began to reply.

She scoffed at him as she returned, "You're as bad as Steve. Got to be a gentleman. Just call me Becca. None of that miss stuff. Makes me feel like my mamma."

She placed the shot glass in front of him and poured him a healthy amount of what smelled like whiskey. He hadn't had a good sip in ages. It had seemed wrong to get drunk after Bucky had fallen when Steve couldn't and at any rate there had simply been no time. They'd needed to extract the information from Zola, to find the Red Skull. Grief had been swept up in a whirlwind of expectation. The winds of time moving faster and faster and leaving them in the dust only to finalize with a crash into that vast expanse of ice.

"Drink," she commanded, pouring whiskey to the brim of her shot glass and knocking it back with ease. Gabe followed suit. She poured again. Three or four shots later the bottle was half-full when she spoke again.

"When did he die?" _When. Not how._ Words carefully enunciated. The time was important to her.

Gabe pushed his tongue up to the roof of his mouth and tasted the bitter, strong flavor of the alcohol. His throat was on fire but it was a good feeling. The warmth in his belly started to settle; a contrast to the cold in his heart. "Two days after your brother."

"Oy-vey," she said, "That fool. Utter fool. My brother would have tanned his hide if he could see him doing such an utterly stupid stunt like that."

Her voice was hoarse. Whether from the hooch or the crying he didn't know. Her words came out with the impression of one who'd like to scream but no longer knew how. Caged.

"I don't doubt it. Plenty of times the boys and I saw your brother flipping his wig over some stunt Steve had pulled or other."

Gabe fondly remembered the way Bucky's face had shut down and the horror on Steve's when Agent Carter had related to them the grenade story. They had placed bets on how long Bucky would be yelling at Steve that night. He'd won five bucks and first watch for a week that night.

Rebecca rubbed her eyes, "Always did. Half my brother's life was spent dragging his ass out of some mess. Oh did my brother love that fool. Never seen anyone so attached to someone so reckless as my brother was to him."

"We all loved him. Him and your brother," Gabe said. He was no good at comfort. The words felt like lead in his mouth.

Rebecca traced the rim of her shot glass with one long, slender finger, "I couldn't believe it when Steve came to me a couple of days after Bucky shipped out and said he was leaving for basic in Jersey. Thought'd he'd gone insane. Course, then he told me not to tell my brother and that's when I knew that, yes, he'd gone insane but was telling the truth. This is their place you know? Asked me to stay here while they were both gone."

Gabe looked around. This had been their apartment? He looked down at the package he'd come to deliver to Rebecca filled with the rest of Steve and Bucky's things that Agent Carter or Howard Stark hadn't kept. He'd brought them home after all. He studied the piano and the dust on the keys. Bucky hadn't been here to play it for a long time. The trunk underneath the bed. He noticed a pile of easels leaned up against the couch he hadn't seen before now. Steve's. Every little quirk of the apartment glaringly revealing its occupants.

"I didn't mind. Needed to get out of my mother-in-law's house. Old bat. But it was supposed to be temporary. Freddie and Georgia have been asking after Steve for days. Asking when he was going to come home. How do I tell them he's not?"

She wasn't asking him how to tell her children that their uncle's friend wasn't coming home. Not really. She wasn't even asking herself.

"Tell them," he started, then stopped. Tell them what? Tell them that the war was over but not only was their father and uncle never coming home but neither was Steve Rogers? Neither was the man who'd probably made them sit still for hours just so he could sketch them or drew them pictures of Dumbo and Snow White. They'd probably grow up watching their uncle patch him up or chew him out. He'd probably chased them around the neighborhood as much as his weak lungs allowed. Maybe helped teach them to play ball.

Had their mother told them he was Captain America? Would being a legend comfort them? Comfort her? What good was being a hero; a martyr. What good was saving millions of lives in New York to those left behind who'd known you. _Really known you_. Not the man in the USO tour videos or the propaganda pieces in the comics. Not the tales told over the radio or the myth that was Captain America. No. How do you comfort them, all of them, when it was Steve Rogers who was dead?

Gabe believed in God. He believed in heaven and he believed in hell and he knew in his heart that Steve and Bucky would have gone to heaven. He wasn't a Catholic, didn't know much about their practices or beliefs but Steve had entered every cathedral and said confession when he could, prayed with rosary beads and recited Hail Mary's. He knew that the Catholics believed that you needed to confess your sins one last time to enter heaven but personally Gabe didn't think anyone needed last rites to enter the pearly gates. Least of all those two.

"Tell them that their uncle is with him flipping his wig because Steve's stupid just couldn't be handled by anyone else," he finally suggested.

Gabe's first smile since Bucky had fallen from the train bloom at the sound of Rebecca's reluctant, amused laughter.

* * *

Bucky's favorite book had been something called _The Hobbit_. He'd carried it around with him everywhere and on slow nights when they weren't out drinking and there was nothing and no one to fight, the days when Steve was reporting and they weren't needed, he'd find a quiet corner somewhere and he'd read. Gabe remembered reading that book during his college days at Howard and wondering at it - at Bilbo. Someone so fundamentally different from the other characters choosing to go along and fight for people he'd never met and had nothing in common with; all fourteen of them bonding and coexisting through sacrifices and betrayals. How? Gabe couldn't comprehend it because by that time he'd seen too many lynching's, too many beatings; he'd fought tooth and nail to get himself the education his parents wanted for him and knew that it was going to be a struggle to continue to get his foot in the door. Why should he bother to try to coexist with those who didn't trust him? Didn't see anything but the color of his skin.

Bucky had been the first man when they'd brought in the 107th he'd seen step up to their German captors and receive beatings for standing up for a Jap. All the other men had looked at Morita with hatred in their eyes. Even Gabe. There was shame mixed in but he couldn't help that pang in his gut when he'd looked at Morita in Azzano before everything. It hadn't mattered that Morita had been born in Fresno, on American soil. All they could see was the shape of his eyes. But shouldn't he have known better? Shouldn't the oppressed know the sting of being looked down on? Of being unwanted? Asked to fight and do their duty to their country and then thrown away to the dogs afterwards?

He'd never felt more out of balance then when he'd seen Barnes getting beat to hell and back for a man he didn't even know. Most men that looked like Barnes wouldn't have even bothered. Would have just kept right on working and stepping over the broken, bruised body of JIm Morita. And then came Steve, charging in to the rescue and putting together a damn team of misfits to punch out the Red Skull. Their own private little company of misfit toys. It struck him now as he continued to reminiscence with Rebecca, who was pouring out stories of their childhood like it was an rope holding her to the shore so she wasn't cast adrift that he should ask her if he could keep that book.

Bucky's voice trailed over Rebecca's in his mind as he closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of their tears, the booze, and the summer air, "_Roads go ever ever on, under cloud and under star, yet feet that wandering have gone turn at last to home afar._"

There was nothing for him in left in Georgia. His parents were gone and what siblings he had where either coming home themselves, lost on the battlefield, or married off. What was in Georgia for him? The green fields and sweet tea of his memories seemed faint. A dream. His life had consisted of the mountains and blood stained warzoness for so long that it seemed like the little boy he remembered was a stranger. Entirely removed.

There was a fight to be won in Georgia though. It was beginning to spread. Seeing this neighborhood with all its people – he knew that fight was important. One that Steve and Bucky would have been rooting for. One that he knew was essential to the type of world that he would have died for over there to begin.

Howard Stark had offered them all jobs at his industry but Gabe had never had a scientific mind. He couldn't engineer anything worth a damn. Never was able to hot wire a car like Steve or build a machine like Stark. There was no place for him there.

Sometimes he wondered if there was any place for a lost soldier. Maybe you could never stop being a soldier.

There was always a new battle. Especially at home.

* * *

"… he was such a dead hoofer," Becca was saying when his mind snapped back to the present. She was telling him about the time when Bucky had attempted to teach a thirteen year old Steve how to lindyhoop. "Couldn't find a rhythm from a hole in the ground. But he kept trying. Never back down, that was Steve."

They'd been trading stories for the better part of an hour or so. The bottle of whiskey was still half-full but their shot glasses were filled; the promise was there. Rebecca related the time the boys had been caught trying to steal pies from Mrs. Miller and he'd told her about the time he'd seen Barnes being chased from a bar by a bunch of angry Italians after he'd flirted a little to long with their dames. She told him about their pillow forts and Steve's horrible singing. Gabe told her about the time that Steve had hid behind his shield when Agent Carter shot at him. Rebecca related the many times Bucky had dragged Steve home with bruises from fights he'd gotten into, either to their aunt or to Sarah Rogers, and Gabe told her about the times he'd seen Bucky stand up to the guards in Azzano.

It should have been painful to talk about them and it was yet not like expected. Hearing what had been lost wasn't akin to a knife wound in the chest; this was rather like a dull ache. There and persistent, never out of mind, but with the remembrance of life. The temperance of the acts that had led to this road. The here and now.

More and more the sound of Becca's voice went from a hoarse whisper to soothing melody. A balm beginning to work its magic on a wound.

He only realized that night had fallen when he heard the quiet knock on the door. His head snapped up at the sound and he pulled his hand away from where it had been resting near hers. His stomach growled and he realized he hadn't eaten since Becca's cabbage stew hours earlier. He got up when she did and moved over towards the couch, out of the line of sight of the doorway.

"Deborah," Becca said quietly. He peered over his shoulder and could see the faint outline of a woman with dark hair and a long black skirt standing in the hallway. "Could you do me a favor?"

The woman's voice was soft and filled with compassion, "Certainly bubbeleh. What is it?"

"Could you ask your grandmother to watch Freddie and Georgia for me tonight? I've been given more news. Steve…" Becca whispered, stepping out into the hallway. The apartment was so small it wouldn't have mattered if she'd gone down the flight of steps with the woman, he could hear every word.

"Steve Rogers is gone. Dead. War took him."

He watched as the woman placed her hand on Becca's shoulder comfortingly, "That boy. That fool-headed boy. Of course. Bubbe will be happy to watch them for you if that is what you need right now. Both of them," the woman's head shook from side to side, "so close. Always together those two."

"That they were. Like glue," Becca replied. The presence of the woman seemed to have brought a fresh wave of grief to her voice. She pushed back Becca's hair in a gesture of comfort and familiarity.

Gabe tried not to eavesdrop as the two women conversed. It wasn't his place. But in the silence of the small apartment their words couldn't be drowned out. He watched the flickering flame from the candle cast shadows on the statue of the Virgin Mary as their voices trailed, first Becca and then Deborah in a ritual of condolence, "_For everything there is a season, a time for every experience under heaven: A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant.."_

The familiar psalm blanketed over him and silently he mouthed the words along with them, hands folded and his head bowed.

Becca came back into the apartment with new tears in her eyes. In her hands was a dish filled with food – it had the faint smell of potatoes and onions – that she set down on the table. Crossing the room back towards the door she picked up the laundry basket labelled _Roth_ and went out to hand it over to the woman. They barely exchanged anymore conversation. Deborah reached out to hug Becca, whispering something that Gabe couldn't catch into her ear, before she departed.

"Deborah Roth and her brother have known Steve and my brother most of their lives. We all went to school together. Her grandmother use to watch us as kids," Becca explained as she closed the door to the apartment. Then she went to pick up their discarded and used bowls from earlier but left the shot glasses. She left the bowls in the sink to be washed.

"Do you have a place to stay tonight Gabe," she asked him. Her voice was level, even. Gabe thought of what his mama would say. His sisters. He thought of Georgia. He'd already stayed to long in this woman's home.

There was a place he was renting on the other side of Brooklyn. A long walk and an even more desolate room. Crowded with soldiers coming home. Men drunk with victory or the horrors of their experiences.

"No Becca," he told her, "I reckon I don't."

She didn't smile but she did place two plates down onto the table. They ate the latkes that Deborah Roth had brought over in silence and drank the rest of the whiskey in their shot glasses. Later on, the sweat pooling into the skin of his collar bones and the feel of her pressed against him, sticking together in the summer heat, head on on his shoulders he thought about all the people he'd seen in Brooklyn. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of her hair. She didn't smell like flowers or any of those fancy perfumes that the call girls' in Europe had preferred.

She smelled like work. Like the battlefields of Europe and the summer air. She smelled of home.

* * *

_"Hey Jimmy," Dum Dum called towards where Bucky was sitting penning down a letter across the room of the small dive bar in the heart of London they currently were. Most of the boys had gone off to sleep – their first week of freedom and real rest away from the toil and sweat of the POW camp – but the three of them of them were still at the bar. Tomorrow, tomorrow they would all report for duty as a new special ops team. Hand-picked. The first of an elite force following Captain America who they'd all seen silly USO movies of. It was like a dream. The first integrated team in the ally forces. Jones wondered if they would end up killing each other off before they took out any of the Jerries._

_ Still, he couldn't help but smile at Bucky's exaggerated eye-roll as he looked over at them._

_"It's Bucky, Dum Dum. There's no one ever called me Jimmy in my life," Bucky growled. They'd had this argument long before Gabe had met the two of them and would be having it long after._

_"I know, I know," Dum Dum said. He rubbed his fingers against his mustache, "So, who are you writing too? Your girl back home?"_

_Bucky smirked, "Sure enough I am. My sister. Becca. Phillips told me he'd sent out letters for the 107th. Should write and tell her there's no need to be mourning me quite yet. She's got enough to worry about with me and her husband out here," he told them and then, grumbling under his breath, "and now Steve to."_

_"Younger or older sister," Gabe asked, thinking of his three older sisters. They were all married and gone now. Some of their husbands might even be here in Europe or over in the Pacific. He hoped none of them had reason to mourn. Thought about sending out his own letter telling them he was alright now that Barnes had given him the idea._

_"Younger. Had two others but they passed away long time ago," Bucky told them. His face was pinched and Gabe frowned in sympathy. Most people he knew had lost a sibling one way or another in childhood._

_"Well how come she's got a fella already and you don't have a girl? Too busy dancing to make a real commitment," Dum Dum teased in an effort to lighten the mood. Gabe hadn't known the man long but he got the feeling that his optimism was hard to kill and that making jokes was his way of dealing with tough emotions._

_"Nah. Nothing like that. She met a guy, did some things, one thing led to another. My aunt told her she either married him or they'd wash their hands of her. They'd already kicked me out so it's not like it's that hard for them to abandon their flesh and blood," he told them nonchalantly. Gabe didn't bother to ask why Bucky had been kicked out of his home. It wasn't his business if Barnes wasn't going to offer it._

_"Is her husband decent at least," he asked. His sisters had all married good, decent men but there were too many out there who didn't know how to treat a woman right._

_Bucky sneered, "He's a shmuck. My Becca deserves better."_

_He pushed his letter away and reached for his glass of scotch. There was an empty bottle next to him but he was showing no obvious signs of inebriation, "So what about you two? You have dames back home waiting on you?"_

* * *

Years later Gabe Jones would wonder if Bucky Barnes would have considered him a better man than Richard Proctor had been. Long after Martin Luther King Jr. and marching in the Civil Rights Movement, long after he'd joined S.H.I.E.L.D. in 1959 and got reacquainted with one Rebecca Barnes who'd found work (or was given work) as Agent Carter's secretary in Brooklyn, he thought about what his old friend would have said.

It had taken them years to get married. They'd had to wait of course. Even though they could have done it in New York she had stood her ground and said she wouldn't marry until she'd be recognized as his wife in his hometown as well as hers.

He'd never stopped being a soldier. Indeed, there was always a battle to be won. S.H.I.E.L.D. The Civil Rights marches. Little Georgia, not so little anymore, she and her girlfriend were in California listening to Harvey Milk. Poor Freddie had been lost in Vietnam. His own son, Jaime Barnes, the child that had been born after they'd first met – he was shipping off to Iraq soon. And his youngest daughter Stephanie had joined S.H.I.E.L.D. Working her way up the ranks.

His mama had worked on a plantation farm as a maid for an affluent family back in Georgia. Mr. and Mrs. Abbott. Mrs. Abbott used to say that violence never solved anything whenever a fight would break out in town. His mama would scoff when they'd get home at night and turn to him and his siblings looking them dead in the eye "Don't go believing that nonsense now. Violence isn't right but sometimes it's unavoidable. Sometimes you're backed into a corner and there's no answer but violence. If that's what you need to do to survive, to grow. Don't go looking for it, don't seek to change things with guns and bombs and fists if words will work but if it comes to it – _don't back down_. Can't win anything, can't fix anything, if you're not willing to fight for it."

Steve Rogers had left a legacy behind. He'd fought for what he'd believed was right and was willing to use any means he needed to not because he wanted the violence but because it was necessary. Gabe could only smile and hope that when the history books wrote down his name alongside Captain America and Bucky Barnes that they would show just how much he'd fought and continued to live up to the ideals they'd all believed in. Hoped that those ideals would one day be part of a better world.

Notes:

1) The ending was actually different then I expected. I expected to have a morning after scene and then a few scenes with Peggy Carter and Gabe Jones joining S.H.I.E.L.D. but I might save that for another fic.

2) The scene where Gabe talks about Morita when he first meets him is somewhat based on the prequel comics to the first Captain American movie in the MCU. All of the Howling Commandos originally meet as POW's (except I believe Dugan and Bucky) in the POW camp and all of them do not get along at first. The fact that Gabe feels somewhat distrustful towards Morita would be period typical for many men against Japanese-Americans at the time.

3) The fact that Gabe and Rebecca slept together the first night they meet might seem rushed to some. Sometimes in grief people will seek out physical comfort and these two characters are reflections of that.

4) Deborah Roth is an original character but the last name is not an original name in Marvel universe. Arnie Roth (only mentioned) was a childhood friend of Steve Roger's. He is a Jewish character and a gay character. I looked up before I wrote in the Ecclesiastes 3 prayer how a Jewish character may react to the death of a gentile. I looked up mourning for both faiths ( /traditional-jewish-mourning-practices) & ( learning-center/resources/psalms/) &.&.. The Psalm Ecclesiastes 3 is a one for comfort that both Judaism and Christianity share but if there are any people out there with more knowledge then me please correct me if needed so that I might change the fic to be more appropriate.

5) The Hobbit by J.R..R Tolkien was published in 1937 so it would have been around during the time when the Howling Commandos were fighting in the war. I had originally had Bucky's favorite book as Lord of the Rings but then realized that none of them had been published until the 1950's long after Bucky had "died."

6) The Irish have a practice when someone dies that all the mirrors and photographs must be turned towards the wall or else the soul of the deceased might be trapped. ( 2012/11/18/how-we-irish-remember-our-dead-november-traditions/). My background for the Barnes' is that they are not actually Irish themselves but Rebecca would have picked this up from Steve or Sarah Rogers at some point during their childhood and that was why she performed the custom for Steve.

7) When Rebecca refers to Steve as a "dead hoofer," that means poor dancer in '40s slang. Flipping your wig is also a slang term for someone getting mad quickly. ( /content/top-15-slang-words-40%E2%80%99s) & ( /history/on-the-homefront/forties-slang-40s/)


End file.
